[Dovecot] dovecot's documentation dearth
Postmaster
postmaster at psy.miami.edu
Tue Aug 16 00:13:56 EEST 2011
Hello. The first thing for me to say is thanks! I've been using
dovecot since test 61 and it has basically performed flawlessly for me
from day number 1. Dovecot makes me look like a genius sysadmin,
especially compared to my colleagues struggling with exchange. So
thanks, gracias, obrigado!!
I'm working on a configuration for 2.0 and I'm finding the documentation
somewhat difficult. I think it would be very helpful to me to have
encountered a single page that detailed all available configuration
sections. I don't know how to find out what the sections are, when to
use them or what specifically they control. So far I've encountered...
passdb
plugin
service
protocol
userdb
local_name (and I think there is another one of these for ips)
The service section itself would benefit from a single page detailing
all of the possible types of service sections available.
The next problem I've had is discovering that several parts of dovecot
have no documentation at all even though they are standalone executables
run by root. config, log, and ssl_params all run as root but there is
also anvil and they look to me like they could support listening on a
port if inet_interfaces is defined.
You can say, "Relax fella, trust me. These programs are all part of
dovecot and are run only if they're needed." Then I'll say, "Yes but
I'm the administrator. I need to know how the parts fit together to
know if the system's broken." Then you say, "Well that makes sense, but
the things you're talking about aren't really configured. They are
mostly internal to dovecot, they just happen to be broken out into
external programs. You may as well be asking for documentation on a
specific function in a library. If that's what you want, you can read
through the source code."
Well I guess that would be one solution. The bottom line is that it
gives me an uncomfortableness to not be able to control or explain the
operation of the software I'm supposedly administering. Take the
program named log (which should be named dovecot-log or something less
generic), it is launched even though I've specified syslog in the
configuration. Logging is not interrupted when the process is killed.
So, why is it running? What is it doing? Why does it need root? How
do I control it? I think these are all good questions for an
administrator to ask.
That's my feedback for what it's worth, but mostly, thanks again for
dovecot!
More information about the dovecot
mailing list